Thought One Hundred Six

I dreamed last night. I do this every night the moment my eyes begin to close; I am off into another dream. In this dream, I was working for the people I currently work for, at a group event/seminar/kick-off/whatever. I recognized some of the people there. During it, I felt my incredible unworthiness. The rejection that I have given all my life at such things as a defense.

It wasn’t anything new; actually, it was old. It’s been with me my entire life, and it’s horrible. Another reason to hate myself. But that’s an old familiar friend as well. Not the kind of friend that makes you feel comfortable, but no, a friend that hurts you because it is curious how you will react. (But even thinking this, it must know by now that I will react as I always have in my broken damage state.)

You’d think that by now, after fifty nine years, soon to be sixty, these things would pass. But they don’t. It’s just one struggle unto the next. One of the reasons I write books. Not those sappy self help books people read in their thirties, but science fiction. Where the universe is of my creating. I think I like the people there much better than the ones here sometimes. But then, I’m not at their mercy either. If I was, I might not enjoy it so much. The omnipotent creation is what comes out. That you can invest in their lives in a deep way without all the clutter and dirtiness of everyday mundane life. You move from one scene to the next, never experiencing the in-between. The in-between is where the gods live, so perhaps that is why we don’t. Between the scenes, between the lives, between the realities of the endless splitting of the universal quantum wave functions that have us living across septillions of infinite universes.
I’m tired of working. I’ve worked my whole life, always doing things for money rather than what I want to spend my time doing. I hope in my next life (assuming there is one), I find what I want to do (of the fifty things I want to do) and then start early doing them. Live a life full of love, laughter, adventure, death defying events, and more. This one has been filled with such levels of suffering and misery, with a few respites of peace and love. I’m in one now, but even this has its challenges.

Mostly to do with myself.

In these waning years, I wish to be excited and motivated. Creative and exploratory. To learn and do. To make the next forty three years the best. Growing and learning, loving and giving. No longer hiding away from the monsters that tortured me for so long. I hope I can hang on that long. That my mind and body keep pushing through. That the unrepentant emotions that burn across me do not drag me down into their stygian abyssal depths. A peaceful existence has not been this life until now. Am I too damaged to enjoy it? Perhaps, perhaps not. There are moments where I am.

When I was in my twenties and thirties, it felt like life would go on forever. That there would not be, could not be an end. In my forties, I began to worry that there might be. In my fifties, I am pretty damn sure that it will end. Going into my sixties next year, I’m learning. This is the part where I have an opportunity to explore myself without all the distractions of constant work, duties, and so on. I’m tired of that. I want to write my books (as I currently do), learn, take a class or two, and work on my hobbies (3D printing, electronics, robotics). Do some painting, find parts of myself that have never had the chance to heal, and do so. I’d like to be a better person for those around me and those that are not.

There will be more challenges in the future. My wife is significantly younger than I am. I can see some of the things coming in the future for her. I want to be whatever it is that she needs. Of aid and comfort to her.

I hope I will be.

Thought One Hundred Five

Image by Robert Day

Today is the last day of the 2021 calendar year. With all of it stutter stops and starts, endless days of nonsense and politics, it still seems to have flown by.

I am thankful to whatever is that gives us a blessing, luck, or good fortune. There is more, at least I think so intellectually, however in the madness of what it is to be human, it’s pretty difficult to tell. I have no faith in things to come, nor in a Santa in the sky that listens to us, because if there is something, I’m pretty sure it does give two damns about us, nor should it. There are far too many monsters out there to be worried about, rather than the insects that circle at its feet, beseeching it for whatever job/mate/sickness/etc. that is currently bothering it.

No, we are on our own.

In the massive expanse that is the ever expanding universe, we’re going to have tIn the massive expanse that is the ever-expanding universe, we will have to make a go of it on our own. As I’ve often thought, we come into this life screaming, toothless, and naked. We’ll exit the same way. Not exactly inspiring, but then it wasn’t supposed to be.

I’ve been studying and relearning about electronics (as a hobby) lately. It led me I’ve been studying and relearning electronics (as a hobby) lately. It led me to so many interesting thoughts. I guess in my mind, I thought of electronic devices as being quite exact (while I was in the military as well 34 years ago). It’s pretty much the opposite. Everything is about capturing the fire. Managing the electricity to do what we want it to do with electrocuting the system, us, and everything else.

So strange. So dangerous. So seductive.

Yet this is what we are. The electrical signals that move through our brain and body. That keeps us breathing, heart pumping, synapses firing. A biomechanics device that fools us into thinking we are sentient by layering slices of partial independent brain function into an amalgamation of what we think of as us.

This magical thing, electricity. The functions that every electrical engineer knows, that power flows outside the power lines rather than through them (A/C). Physics of electricity that we think we understand but don’t.

That’s why they are theories, right?

As I delve into the mysterious inner workings of the electronic components, As I delve into the mysterious inner workings of the electronic components, examining the sine waves as I build and experiment, I think these are the building blocks, the fire that we truly cannot capture nor contain. This unstoppable energy that seems to be everywhere, in everything.

Or perhaps it is just a signature of something else.

Thought One Hundred Four

The Supermassive Tank “Stella Extinctor”

I’ve been reading some interesting books lately that have really left me pondering. Always good material for the direction of my Science Fiction Novels. But it also takes me places that are a little scary, very interesting, and feeling sometimes disturbed. As a human bug clinging to this ball of mud flinging outward at forty percent of the speed of light, it’s hard to see your place in the world. Sure, if you read Linkedin, Medium, etc., you’d think finding your way among social media would send you on a path of enlightenment.

But it doesn’t.

You, me, and everyone else are all bug scrabbling in the mud together. Thinking we are doing something when we’re not. There is no “meaning” to life. No great Santa in the sky that rewards us for following the rules or burns us eternally when we don’t.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t something more. Something that gets hinted at through the passing of knowledge through history in mythology, religion, history, and so on. I do think there is something more. It just isn’t what we think it is.

It’s most likely something else, and it doesn’t begin to care about us, much less be aware of our existence (assuming there is something else). Childhood stories that keep us immature in thought and deed. You certainly don’t need religion to chose to be a decent person, versus a psychopath.

That leads me here. I have known about wave-particle duality for some time. For example, how light is both a particle and a wave. These is a lot more information available about this subject, all of it having been proven numerous times. I recently learned that all particles have this same wave-particle duality. This is, of course, at the quantum level, but it is vastly interesting. It explains a lot when you think about the electron circling an atom’s nucleus, flashing in and out of existence.

Perhaps then we are composed the same way that light is. It makes the idea that there is something more beyond the concept of quantum foam, where particles appear from nothing (quantum foam) as if magically. We live in exciting times, maybe enough that we might rediscover some of what’s lost. Information on a scale that would change forever how we view everything.

Wave-particle duality of everything.

The idea is that gravity is caused by mass (planets, stars, etc.) bending spacetime (sorry, gravitons).

That perhaps we exist in “block time,” and we are simply traveling through it. That it all exists, every permutation. This also leads us to the idea of multiple realities (somewhat supported by the lack of mass in some star systems for their size. Currently attributed to dark energy (a placeholder word, meaning we don’t know). Perhaps this might lead us to time travel. Although it is highly likely if we can achieve this, the places in time we might go would be into another reality (back or forward in time), including when we came back. Massive energy requirements to do something like this (zero-point energy might be the solution).

Do we go on when our body dies? Is there a soul, a unique part of us that carries on ad infinitum? I want to think so. Reincarnation, lives lived over and over again.

But if not, it will still be ok. Energy converted to mass and mass to energy.

We will live on, if only as an endless part of the universe’s existence. It’s only our split-brain, many layered amalgamations of what gives us what we think of as a mind or the barest hint of sentience. That part of us quavers to never die, to not lose consciousness. Something that could be the rarest of things or the most common among the stars.

I’ll be thinking about this; I hope now you will too.

Thought One Hundred Three

When you’re young, you fool yourself, thinking this life will last forever. Never recognizing the absolute craziness of your emotions. What it does to you, your thoughts, feeling.
As British philosopher Alain de Botton has said, we’re all crazy. The sooner you recognize this, the easier things become. Instead of hanging on by your fingernails, white knuckling it through whatever you’re going through, you can relax just a bit, knowing your batshit crazy emotions are messing with you.

Whether the human animal that we call ourselves is sentient or nonsentient is hard to tell. I’m at a stage where I think we have moments of sentience, but essentially we are controlled by our emotions, emotions by our bodies, bodies by food, environment, people/situations/etc. At best, we can write all of this down, focus on logic when we can, use the creative, inspirational parts of us to elevate to perhaps a little bit of something else.

These are the thoughts that pass through my mind as I sit here writing my sixth book.
Manage your emotions and keep the sailing ship’s keel from tipping too far in one direction or the other. Balance out as you can.
Know that in the end, we know nothing and probably never will.

And that’s ok.

So you focus in on the moments experienced. Perfect, imperfect, big or small. Enjoy the taste of the coffee in that well used mug. The burn of a cigar in the cool air of the morning. The sweet memories of moments with your wife from the night before. Rereading the scene of the book you are working on. The three little dogs that run around your feet desiring nothing more than your attention.

Stay the course. Know that this too shall pass as all things do.

As I laid on the comfortable outdoor sofa in the front alcove of my home, staring up at the lizards catching bugs on the clear plastic above me, I wondered. Are the animals like these on other planets? And why shouldn’t there be? If they evolved here, then it stands to reason they would in other places too. Amalgamations of systems that make us up as individuals. The flora and fauna of our intestinal tracks, without which we would most assuredly die. We are already traveling on a spaceship, going 40% the speed of light outward. What are we going to find out there?

Ourselves?

Perhaps.

Empire State Building, NY – Robert Day

Thought One Hundred Two

The dragon was massive. Larger than anything I’d ever seen. At least a mile long as I receeded into the air.

My wife tells me that dragons are good luck, a sign of wealth and peace in the Far East. Although here in the West, they are often seen as the opposite. The dragon seemed peaceful as it slowly emerged from the dark waters. Only being seen when it chose to be.

This led me to think about what is next. I don’t mean in this life, my career, etc., but what comes next. A feeling of “This is exciting.” As the next thing, life after death, reincarnation, disintegration into vast nothingness, will be interesting. Knowing what comes next, even for a moment, may indeed be what makes it all worthwhile.

The grand adventure.

See you there.

Ouroboros

Thought One Hundred One

Wolf paws by Robert Day

The river is wide, the river is deep, oh my mind finds its way to the shore. An all road lead to tranquility base where I won’t cry out anymore.

The dreams last night were long and winding. Ending with a version of the Styx song “Boat on the river.” The music set at a higher pitch, the harmony a sweeter version, it makes sense as I walked through this land of death that the end should be with music by a group named after the River Styx and the boat therein.

There were these not quite cubes that glowed with a burning energy when heated in fire. The energy they gave off allowed you or the one in possession of them to do astonishing things. But they were hidden in a room with a dragon that was only a head and another entity that spoke to you if it allowed.

I wanted to take them, but to take them was to take the consequences along with them. Those consequences pushed me to give them back. That I no longer wanted what would happen to happen.

Confusing, yes.

But there were other people as there always are. One small boy ran an ATV into a deep pool in the back yard. Crying after he’d done so. Not willing to accept the consequences of his actions, angry, the green ATV now sat flooded at the bottom of the deep pool of water.

Seeing this, I remember being angry. Yelling at him that he was responsible for it. Now the engine would need to be rebuilt. Turning away from him before I could say anything else. There were other people there too. Familiar, yet not so after waking from this dream. It was a long dream, as I still felt asleep when I did wake up.

The sound of the music still in my ears. With the light of this January 2nd, 2021, coming in through the windows, I rose for another day of being human or whatever it is that we are.

Thought One Hundred

I know, it’s been a while.

A lot of my thoughts these days go into my books. Two published on Amazon (Mongruxx – Wolfpac, Mongruxx – Starship Umbra), the third about to be (Transport – Unfriendly Skies), and the forth I am writing (Mongruxx – Where the river ends), even today!

Golgoth and Sam, in the White Desert

I dreamed last night. I dream every night. Often it feels exhausting. They start the moment my eyes begin to close and finish as I open them back up. The line between dreaming and being awake is quite thin for me.

Is this normal? It is for me. I’ve been dreaming this way since I was a small child as far back as I can remember.

I dreamed last night. It was long and winding, a year perhaps in dream time. There was something for the gods, some form of representation? Not worship, but awareness and honoring, something I can’t seem to get my arms around, but it was a central part of the dream. It was there for the gods. Three of them, I think. When I awoke, my alarm had been going off (vibrating) for a good thirty minutes.

That’s different for me.

Four-thirty am, I get up, brush my teeth, get dressed, and head into my office to do some writing before the world starts stealing my time, moments, life, as I agreed to. Just for money. A house on the golf course, expensive cars, expensive habits, etc.

Ramble much. A bit, I suppose.

Corona Puppies

I sit out on the back deck, thinking. My new corona puppies (two miniature Chihuahuas and a Maltipoo) run and prance around the yard. Thinking about how we, as Richard Dawkins puts it, are survival machines. Not for ourselves, of course, but for the genes we carry. Flint like things that rarely change. Only we change as they are recombined across our grandparents and progeny. But we can rebel against them. We can choose to have no children effectively killing these genes. I didn’t rebel. I have one child, my daughter.

I thought perhaps the gods are similar in construction. Made up of something akin to genes. Through evolution, these life forms become something more, even able to, like us, rebel against their god genes. Is this possible? We do it, why not them? That is assuming they exist (I think they do).

That brought me to another place, thinking of the “Christus.” Unbidden, a thought came of how malignant the Christian religion is. I’ve had thoughts like this in the past, but recently as I finished the Vikings series on Prime, I realized how the Christian religion crushed the so-called pagan religions. One of the things I like about that series is how they brought the gods to be so alive in the Norsemen’s lives. Odin, Freya, Loki, and the rest. I know that these are gods were derived from other older gods, but in the reading I have done around them, I find them magnificent in their own way. They called them pagans because of the sacrifices they made, yet the Christians (Catholics) still do make sacrifices. That’s what Mass is. Body and blood?

It was the dreams last night drove these thoughts, and I have probably done a poor job writing about them. But I do enjoy the ideas. The exquisite sense of tasting these thoughts as they travel through my mind.

Thought Ninety Nine

What is death?

A simple on and off switch? The end of all things, our bodies breaking down and reverting to the building blocks that it was before our mothers ingested then and used them build us out of the selfish genes coming from our grandmother and grandfathers by way of good old Mom and Dad?

It’s an interesting question.

I was watching two different shows today, West World season three (HBO) and Upload (Amazon). West World is pretty amazing. They have a take on life that has a bit of depth to it. In this week’s episode, at the end (spoiler), Deloris and Mauve die. No big surprise there, they’ve been killed hundreds if not thousands of times. Looking at them both dead, I thought of how there were just turned off, like a lamp.
I’ve been taught through my life that our soul lives forever. But what if it doesn’t? It just gets turned off when we die. Then becomes awake later, when it is turned on again.
The birth, death, and rebirth cycle.

Reincarnation.

Perhaps that is why we don’t remember. The river of sleep is just us, unplugged. Our memories gone. Like a computer, when turned off, the code unwritten to disk disappears when the power goes out.

In the show “Upload” on Amazon, your mind is uploaded to a computer afterlife. However, there are a lot of issues (pay for everything, shallow characters, etc.). The show is funny and cute, but I wondered when they were uploaded, aren’t they just a copy of the original person?
Or are they the real person?
What is sentience? We think we are sentient, but most of us do nothing but escape in our lives. The pain of existence stepping on us at every moment.
They turned off their bodies, the mind, memory files, etc. when uploaded. A computer game, so to speak.

Maybe we aren’t sentient. Our consciousness a projection of something that isn’t really there. Some other thing, like an animal of sorts, maybe. We recently bought some puppies. Love in the time of corona madness. They are two teacup chihuahuas and one teacup Maltese. I enjoy the experience of them. The sweetness, the beauty of watching the innocent behavior, before the world has a chance to sully them. At the same time, I know I am anthropomorphizing them. They show affection, but they cannot speak. They are little more than programmed biological robots. I think we may be as well.

We can evolve.

Maybe.

I’ve been trying.
I think the wiring in my biological robot body is different. I dream the moment my eyes start to close. I see the gods in my dreams sometimes. I participate in a thousand million different realities while sleeping, often more exhausted when I wake up, then I was when I went to sleep.
There is something more, or as I said, my wiring is messed up, and this is how my robot functions.

The quieting of our world brought something else out. I was sitting out on my deck, smoking a pipe, when I saw it. A small forest daemon. I was able to see it for a short period before I forgot and looked at it directly (it disappeared). A moment or two later, I saw it again.

A good day.
I wonder how many others are out there, hidden in plain sight.
The quiet does that. Deer venture in closer to us, as do so many other things.
It is an interesting world we live in. I hope we are sentient, even if everything means nothing. That uncomfortable truth. For a small passage of the turning of this world, as we hurl outwards at forty percent of the speed of light, we have a forever.

A beautiful one.

Thought Ninety Eight

Working on my third book this morning, I found myself thinking about our excrement. I recently finished listening to Richard Dawkins, “The Selfish Gene.” Amazing, interesting, and possibly delightfully destructive to your way thinking. I have enjoyed this book as well as many others of his (when I don’t find them depressing).

But it all comes back to us being survival machines for our genes. Part of that means we are machines, much like cars. Input gasoline, air, a spark, and out comes us, roaring down the road at 95 mph down the fort bend toll road.

Our bodies are a lot like that. When we get sick or die, much like the car that catches fire and burns, our body expells shit (used food). Although it seems disgusting, it does really make sense to me. I often sit in our third small bathroom reading and shitting. Thinking about our lives (us bugs clinging to this rock, hurtling outward at 40% of the speed of light), if there is something more. Quantum physics seems to indicate there is a lot more. But I doubt it is any of the nonsense we hear from major religions. How do you explain the unexplainable? In quantum physics, they give names to it, like dark energy, antimatter, etc. These are place holder names for things that can’t be explained at our current level of technology and knowledge.

Personally, I hate the thought of asking “Santa God” for things. “Please, Santa God, sell my other house. I really want it sold.” A waste of time and energy! It’s depressing that we think these things. Instead of changing our thoughts, us becoming something beyond our crappy limitations and doing something more.

I haven’t mastered this, but I’ve started. Who would have thought I could write science fiction and that people would read it, like it, be disturbed by it, etc? Not me in my earlier version of life. Robert Day 2.0 started in 2014. Six years later, I am still growing, struggling with old bad mental habits. I’ve published two science fiction books and am working on a third, with two more planned!

I certainly wouldn’t have.

I love learning all of this. The writing, the learning about how to be married a second time. This time, to a kind and supportive person. That still has problems and learning opportunities. I am embarking on a new job on Monday (March 2) and looking forward to the challenges as well as learning opportunities within it. I will have to change the time that I do my writing in and several other things, but it looks exciting, fun, and an opportunity to learn.

Learning is what it is about, after all. Learning all that we can, from everything we can, the most significant part coming from us.

 

 

Thought Ninety Seven

I awoke today, feeling anxious. A calendar reminder told me what day it was. Independence day. The day that marked my escape from a world of madness and endless mental torture by a despotic, narcissistic monster. But I still didn’t really put it together until I was speaking with my beloved, and she reminded me that “The Body Remembers.” I felt better knowing that, even if I was still feeling triggered by my CPTSD.

My freedom and life began again after the death of my youngest brother. He committed suicide. Another victim of my father’s alcoholic sins. All of us (including my mother) were mistreated, terrorized, and damaged by my father’s behavior. We escaped any way we could. But my sister took her life seventeen years ago, and my brother five years ago — all victims of my father rage and alcoholism

I was fortunate, the US Navy became my family for seven years and I found people around it that loved me and helped me heal a bit. Fast forward through seven years of the Navy and I met my first wife. Six years older than me, attractive and cunning, she was in effect my father (his behavior) in a skirt. She destroyed everyone around her. I became like my mother, just trying to survive. A hellish life that proceeded to get worse every year, each day a slow walk through hell. My brother woke me up. His suicide woke me to the horror that my life was.

I planned to leave, but I was weak. I’d planned it many times before. Fantasized of going many times, but I was nervous. Afraid to go. I had started to believe the lies she had told me for so many years.

I felt weak again, and I told my self that I would leave after Christmas. I began to pull back and protect myself. Hiding often in my study, behind a locked door.

Then the impossible happened. Attempting to manipulate me, she pretended to commit suicide like my brother. Faking an attempt at suicide with a dollar store pair of safety scissors. I reacted by calling the police. Unable to manipulate the police, fire dept. and social services, they committed her involuntarily for five days.

That allowed me to escape from her. I have no doubt she would have tried to either imprison me, kill me or something worse. I survived, rented an apartment, filed for divorce, and started a four-year trek that included eighteen months of getting divorced and then being sued four times by her.

Today marks that anniversary.

To freedom!

Thought Ninety Six

Reading an article on Medium, they spoke about the “HP Lovecraft” or as I think of it, “Lovecraftian” point of view. That being, that the gods are old, ancient beings that care not a wit for if we exist or not. Funny, I remember reading HP Lovecraft when I was in sixth grade. It scared the shit out of 1975 me. But I didn’t really connect this to the view I have developed and held over the last few years. I’m 56 years old, divorced at 51, and remarried last year. If there are gods (and I think there are), they don’t give a shit if we exist or not.

Not really a bad thing considering.

Think about ants. I don’t care about ants. Unless they bite me. Then I wanted them to die. I routinely check my yard for ants, put out poison for them, and hope that there might be a special hell for them (although I don’t think there is). A god or gods, if aware of us, might decide to do the same thing. Put out the ant poison for us, or worse. Decide to subsume our souls on a galactic scale. Just so it could be, just a little bit more.

I don’t think they are aware of us.

I’ve had a lot of interesting experiences over my life, some that involve a couple of different gods. Gods that I did not know the name of, or anything about. It was only after some discussion with a close friend that I found out who they were, or really what we call them. We would be crushed out of existence if we could truly approach. Not out of malevolence, but more like the voltage is too high. We’re like the 110-volt circuits in our home, where the gods are like a ten thousand volt high tension power line. Our circuits can’t handle that level of voltage. We just burn up.

I think that our sense of goodness, of being a good person, good karma, or consequence, is a part of who we are. We naturally gravitate towards light, unless our experiences across multiple lifetimes lead us down a dark road. Then it is up to us to change that. Always easier said than done.

I was listening to the song “The devil in a wishing well” by Five for Fighting. I realized that we are the devil trapped in the wishing well. Feeling that we are trapped, demanding from others when instead, we must fight the daemons within ourselves that demand our fealty. Fealty to anxiety, to fear, to anger and depression. When we reach out to others with our pain, we open the door to allow a friend to help us fight the darkness, the daemons, and monsters that lurk within us, waiting to rend and tear.

You can suffer in the darkness. Or you can pull your sword from its scabbard. Take a honing stone and polish the edge to razor sharpness.

Then fight.

 

Thought Ninety Five

We want to be safe, but we never are.

This gun on my hip, the knife on my belt may give me solace, as does the extra mags of ammunition. But there is no place safe. There is no place where you can run. Death walks along with you, no matter the steps you take and the faint echoes of the gods laughter, that doesn’t know you even exist, much less care.

So, no. We aren’t safe and never will be.

We are free, though. Well, kind of. Free to explore our minds in the time we have before recycling countless times through the river of sleep. Forgetting all of our past here’s  and lost tomorrows that there are. Free to dream of things beyond our reach. Free to dream of the dreamers, dreaming the dream of us. Yes, we are free in the deep parts of our minds when we choose to be.

Our emotions are what make us slaves. To create (as the FBI would put it) the lack of resiliency within ourselves. To catastrophize the small events in our lives that are really just stepping stones across a shallow creek. Our wants and needs make us into slaves of “things we want.” Cars, phones, trips, furniture, boats and a bunch of other shit that means nothing to the value of our lives.

Emotional slavery?

Is that even a thing?

It could be, I guess.

I have worked for the last four decades plus. Now I just want to be free. To write my books (Mongruxx WolfPac, the second book is coming later this year), write my blog about the ridiculous, crazy thoughts that are mine, hang out with my family and friends, and just plain live. That’s what I want. Just to live. Not chasing the dollars that I do full time. I like the money, but am perpetually bored by it all. That happens after a long life of walking through this particular patch of hell. Twenty-seven years of hell. It’s over now, but I’ve been scarred in ways that vex me still.

It’s not safe to do this. It’s not safe to run with scissors or leap before you look. To jump into the pool right after you’ve eaten a slice of pizza or on Taco Tuesday. No, it isn’t safe. It isn’t safe to write words that make you look like you are out of alignment with societal norms.

Nothing is safe. Until you decide it doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t matter if it’s safe, because I’m going to do this anyway. I’m going to pick up my scissors and start running down the street. I’m going to leap and not give a fuck about looking. I’m going to eat at MOD pizza, then jump in a pool and swim. And if I projectile vomit later, that will be an exciting experience as well.

Perhaps as I hear the faint footfalls of the gods echoing across the vast and unknowable universe, this bug, clinging to a rock will look into the sky and be unsafe for a moment or two.

 

Thought Ninety Four

Us bugs traveling on this rock, hurtling out into nowhere.

I looked into the sky, seeing massive cumulus clouds in exquisite detail. Replanting a mango tree I had grown from a seed into a bigger pot, I felt connected to this plant. Planting it, I became responsible for its life. In this endless life and death cycle. Planets orbit our sun as it circles within the milky way galaxy over a two hundred and twenty five million year period. Again, these galaxies moving outward at unfathomable speeds outward into the ever-expanding black.

We are Don Quixote. Tilting against windmills that we think are dragons. Old yet new, we sit, our armour rusty and dented across time. The dirt gathered under our fingernails, boots worn and damaged with age. We sit on an old stone bench that could have been here when the Romans marched across these lands. Their a leather and armour creaking and clanking, that all lay rusting in death now. As this planet orbits around the sun, within the spinning galaxy that surely heads towards a collision with the andromeda galaxy six to nine billion years from now.

Destruction and reformation.

Something old becomes something new. Yet still, we hurl outward. Life, death, and reformation. Will we remember across these lives that we’ve lived, a thousand million times? Perhaps not, but yes is a possibility. To commemorate the lives well lived and the ones wasted. As this planet spins, staring into a small screen with intensity. The massive cumulus clouds form and dissolve. The sky clear, then not.

Looking into the sky, this bug clinging to a rock looks on and wonders.

 

Thought Ninety Three

It is interesting listening to the very young, their logic and reasoning. It reminded me of when I was at that age. I remember what I thought and how it felt. It’s kind of strange, but I can remember my thoughts and feelings across many different periods of my life. The storm filled rage of the household that I grew up in. My father, the drunken violent melovolent man that made what should have been a loving home, a pit of despair.

My mother married him at a very young age, because as she said: “He was the first one that asked.” In my opinion, she had a poor self-image because she was a little overweight and wanted to get out into the world. My father was a good looking young man with a daemon inside. He grew up in a home where his mother and father were both alcoholics, the father being a violent one. A match made in hell.

Sitting here in my peaceful home, I think about these things and am grateful. Yesterday was our first anniversary. My beloved is sweet and kind, her children much like her. She makes our life together sweet and beautiful. I feel worthy of this these days. This is kind of a new development. But I do. Just as I realized a couple of days ago, seeing myself in the mirror, that I am a writer novelist. I published my first book a few months ago and am forty thousand words into the next one. Again, I didn’t feel like it before, but I do now.

I hope you get a chance to reach this part of your life.

It was a damn lot of pain and work to get here. And the work never will never end until I do, but that is all part of it. The day to day living is pretty good. At fifty six years old, I am living the life I want to live. There are compromises and corrections, but I am just glad to be here, glad I can write and create as I do.

Us bugs on a rock. Traveling at forty percent of the speed of light as we are hurled out into the ever expanding great unknown. All of this, happening inside of a black hole that contains many other black holes. The small we get, the larger we become.

Alone in the dark, we cling to each other, while the gods walk by us, their echoing laughter heard in the thunder and quaking earth.

 

 

 

Thought Ninety Two

I read an interesting article on Medium. You have to kind of filter through the site as about seventy percent of it, is not worth reading. Perhaps it’s just me seeing such juvenile attitudes.

That could be.

But one of the things that those young writers don’t know (by experience anyway) is that they too will get old. Their attitudes will change; wisdom will perhaps find its way into their minds and hearts.

Maybe anyway.

The article talked about being in survival mode rather than in “made it” mode. That our brain and emotions somewhat trick us, as we have learned always to be in survival mode, rather than only in that mode when we actually need to survive.

That made sense to me.

When I look at myself, I am in an almost constant form of survival mode. Whether it is my work, writing, relationships, or whatever, that is where I find myself. So I decided I would do something different today. Survival mode involves escaping (as in escaping myself). So I am going to engage in nonsurvival behaviors. I realize that I might (might? Most likely!) will find myself uncomfortable doing this.

But all change is uncomfortable.

So, here goes.

 

 

Thought Ninety One

An older post from a few weeks ago:

Keeping busy keeps you from looking at the miasma that is the emotional content of your mind

Anxiety or fear is a huge driver. No one wants to do this shit alone. Until they realize the crazy compromises that are required of you and that you require of them (your partner). Our eyes fade as our hearing does, so that as we age, we don’t kill each other with each of our madnesses.

Our madness is what largely drives us. Our fuckup crazy emotionally damaged inner lives. Some drink and drug to escape it, but there is no escape. The only way around it, is through it. To wrestle with the maddeningly damaged creatures that we are. Sometime’s a minute at a time, sometimes longer. But time doesn’t really exist, so you get to make up the measurement. So build your own world and how you wish to see it. Make it as beautiful as you wish. Or a war torn dystopia with violence at every edge and place. I am building mine. It’s fucked up, but that’s me, fucked up, broken and just a hair trigger away from pulling on the ejection handles. Not that it would do any good. It just a worthless reset through the river of sleep. Start over for the billionth time.
This must be why the gods are mad. If they experience pain and madness in unimaginable levels, how could we expect sanity? Sanity and quantum physics don’t go together at all. The smaller the particles get, the more we realize how nothing is what it seems at all.

Sentience is overrated.

Thought Ninety

In a strange way that I can’t explain (but may in quantum physics I can see things. The end of life for some expressed as a number, sometimes more. I felt sad about that recently, realizing that. I wish it would never end, but then this wouldn’t be the opportunity it is to learn, become sentient, and remember.

Perhaps this is why we don’t remember life to life, because we lack clear sentience. It makes sense to me. Life after life of reincarnation, doing the same stupid things we always do as the gods implacable are not interested at all.

Does a cat remember?

The good feelings, the fear, anger. Maybe, I think probably. But sentient thought, not likely. Us either. We don’t remember because we actively choose not to be sentient or thinking. We spend our time caught up in feeling, bodily need, or at least received that way (food, sex, comfort, anger, etc.).

No wonder the gods are bored.

Boredom indicates sadness (as in feelings).

We live in a magnificent place and time (movement). I am sitting in my garage before I start this day. Enjoying a hot cup of black coffee and an Arturo Fuentes cigar as is my want. We are here to think. To experience wonder. To love deeply and become unbound from our anxieties, worries, and the other garbage that drags us down into the deep like an anchor chain.

Don’t let anything matter except what you decide matters. Look into the sky and enjoy the complex and ever changing scenery of the clouds dancing across the sky. The water of the beach lapping at your toes. The feel of wet green grass under your feet. The subtle and complex taste of a black cup of coffee, the fine smoke of a good cigar.

Then think.

Thought Eighty Nine

Scale, 

is an interesting thing. It all depends on your view. Something large can appear small and something small can appear quite large. 

Obvious you would think?

Maybe. When it comes to human communication, scale becomes a factor.

I learned something important yesterday in a discussion. In my broken universe, where the god’s rumble and destroy on vast scales across many a thousand million years, my reactions to people, opportunities and pretty much everything else, is in minutes. Yes, minutes. Not days, or weeks, or even months. Minutes.

Sounds pretty painful? It is.

Relatively healthy people react to situations, communications, etc. on a longer timeline. Perhaps healthy is a misnomer. Balanced may be a more accurate description.  For instance, someone sends you an email or text asking about something you think is important. A healthy person may think about it and then respond. An unhealthy/balance deficient person would look at it from a threatened point of view. This would in all likelihood produce anxiety. This anxiety might facilitate the person responding from a somewhat reduced vision viewpoint. If the unhealthy/balance deficient person chose to expand the scale of their response from three minutes to three hours or the next day, the response becomes less based on anxiety or fear. Perhaps instead based on thoughtful consideration. Anxiety and fear create a short functional timeline. Again it is about scale.

“It’s like juggling sphincters, your hands are going to get shitty” quote Robert Day 6/18/2019

I have observed in my past life, persons practicing exactly that, although not well mind you. Choosing to make decisions after 24 hours of thought (Although if I am honest, it was more likely non-thought). Perhaps this is a good thing. However, our lives are lived in this moment. So we would be required to live our lives on a delay. In the hyper-awareness of the scale I currently live in, this would be a radical change.

How to do this and still keep up with the thousand million pop-ups that demand our attention each day? Something to think about or meditate on perhaps. Or I will anyway. For a least twentyfour hours or perhaps even three weeks as I attempt to change the scale.

Three steps forward, four steps back. The end is as old and bitter as an old cigar, long dried up.

 

Thought Eighty Eight

I am broken.

I walk through this world knowing that I am. There isn’t much I can do about this, but love the people around me in the ways that I can. For I am broken. Crazy, perhaps, broken, absolutely. I love Manya as if there is no tomorrow, for there is not. I accept the crazy stupidity that is me at times, for I know I am broken.

The dark gods that look at us and watch us impassionately know this to be true. Don’t destroy me for I am love. That is who I am in this and every other moment, but if you do, I will live in this moment forever. So say a prayer to whatever dark gods you pray too, I will beseech them as well. Walking along this dark path, we shall find things we never thought that we could dream and make them so. For we are the gods within our time.

Stay frosty my friends,

 

Thought Eighty Seven

My tribe.

What tribe do you belong to I wonder? When I was in the US Navy back in the eighties, I belonged to the tribe VAW123, the ScrewTops. As our boson,s mate called them, the “fucking dome heads”. I was in “first lieutenant”. The guys that cleaned the shitters, buffed the floors, that kind of stuff. Most sailors that joined a squadron spent three months or so there, then went to a shop. Airframes, power plants, etc.

Not me. Fuck that shit.

I decided to stay in “first lieutenant” as long as I could. I could buff the hell out of those floors. Cleaning shitters was like breathing to me. Then I started discovering the stencils I could make of the heavy cardboard material we used for making lettered stencils. I made images of our squadron planes.

Jackpot.

The officers loved it and wanted that stenciled on their doors, Ivy stencils on the walls of their staterooms. I remember the officer that held the qualification of being a trombone major in college so he could learn how to fly an E2C Hawkeye. Jesus in a sidecar, the plumber was probably more qualified. I stayed there for a year rejecting anything that tried to get me to move.

In fact, I rejected the shit out of that squadron. I rejected them so hard, I was finally transferred to the ship’s company. Back then they called my group GSE (Ground Support Equipment), part of AIMD. Now I heard they dropped the “G”. Efficiency I guess. To much time and gods damned energy to say the full “GSE”. I loved working on that ship.

The USS America, CV66. A god’s damned carrier and the last of a dying breed. She still burned dinosaurs. A hundred an hours or so I think.  I was named a DCPO. I crawled through air ducts changing dirty filters. Did periodic maintenance on fire main, valves and hatches.

Good times.

After three and a half years aboard her sacred decks, I transferred to shore duty, A heretic to the last. Abandoned my post and saluted her amidship and aft once more. She was born on the year that I was, in 1963. Her keel laid and life among the endless waves begun. I, a young lass of dubious heritage and thoughtless countenance walked her decks for three and a half years of her long and storied life. I hope the echo’s of my footprints still tremble in her sea laden hull three hundred miles off the coast of Norfolk’s pier 12 at the bottom of the sea.

Fair winds and following seas…

That was my tribe back then. Until it wasn’t anymore. The world has moved on since then. It kind of makes you think, who is my tribe? How long will we gather to devour the others that threaten us so?

I wish I knew. Tribe or no tribe. The monsters, gods, and daemons await to slaughter us all. Our minds barely sentient and for only a few rarified moments when we are not consumed with sex, food, tv, etc. and other bullshit.

So I sit, writing to you who might read this and wonder, what foul mind is this that might write of this that indeed this way comes?

Perhaps a friend, known not yet.

Thought Eighty Six

What if we are already in a black hole.

All space and time are compressed into one and can never escape. We have the observable universe dancing around us in a never-ending cycle. All while our universe continues to uniformly expand at forty percent of the speed of light and scarily the speed is increasing. In our unescapable universe within this black hole, other black holes exist as per the majority of large galaxies. Black holes so massive that we can barely calculate their size.

And perhaps then within these black holes in the galaxies of our universe, once you cross the event horizon of one and go past the point of no return. Before the gravitational forces can twist and tear you into pieces, then compress you down infinitely. You reach the point where you can never escape and all of eternity passes you by. You find yourself in another universe that again continues to uniformly expand at forty percent of the speed of light and scarily the speed is increasing. In this unescapable universe within this particular black hole, that other black holes exist as per the majority of galaxies.

Then perhaps the universe that we started from, before we crossed another black hole’s event horizon and reached the point of no return. Perhaps that universe is itself is a black hole in another universe.

Circles within circles. Unending, interleaving the fabric of reality where we exist and don’t all at the same time.

Perhaps that is how we gods exist from one to another, at these scales and beyond. How we make up all that is and is still yet to come. The endless circle repeating over and over again. Across mythology and story, the same stories are told on a thousand million planets, worlds without end. When we reach the point where even the gods are reborn. Knowing not themselves, until they do or remember.

We wish we could when we would not.

We wish we did, but we don’t.

The river of sleep that all succumb to in it’s forgotten finality.

Ending and beginning. 

The story is written, unwritten and rewritten.

Until nothing remains, not even the memory of what once was…

Chapter 24, Scene 5 – Mongruxx: WolfPac (Copyright 2018)

Thought Eighty Five

I am finding it harder to care about things. My time means more to me than a possession.  What we subjectively experience as time passing by, doesn’t really, it’s just our experience of this subjective reality. How our brain filters out the bulk of the input overload from our eyes, skin, taste, smell, etc. and puts together a picture that we “experience”. Then, even that is affected by how our body may be reacting to being hungry or stressed, or if we feel depressed or happy even…

It is a big stinking mess. It’s hardly fair to even call us conscious at all. If that’s what we are. Maybe we have moments of it, between feeling anxiousness, hunger, feeling threatened, aroused, etc.

Only in those moments of clarity when our turbulent minds are calm and placid, do we perhaps experience consciousness. As we expand ourselves and reach out to be something else. Most of the time we are not much better than animals. Like feral pigs rooting around in the dirt, snarling and arguing. Feeling fear and regret. Flinching away from the pains that surround us. The word conscious is a Latin word, meaning being aware or knowing. We are aware of ourselves internally and externally. But most of that is either external stimuli or our own internal stimulus.

I have met many people over my life, that had very little internal awareness of themselves. That actively chose to be externally focused. With no inner life what so ever. Like alligators sitting in a bog looking for their next meal.

Or a duck perched in a tree, where ducks are not supposed to be, but that would be fine with me, if a duck chose a tree, to see what it could see while trying to be, as happy as a duck could be while sitting in a tree.

Thought Eighty Four

It is our story.

Your story and mine. Each of us individually. Sometimes together, sometimes not. But it is the story that matters. That is why we get so engrossed in TV, movies, Netflix, video games, books, and the Internet. But our story matters not, as much as the story overall.

This story of the expanding universe, the civilizations that rise and fall. Across a thousand billion planets of which we are one. Drifting, moving, across a universe that is expanding at 40% of the speed of light.

We want our story to matter. Linkedin is full of people telling everyone to follow their dream, work more and longer to achieve those same dreams. At a certain point, you begin to wonder if it is some self-masturbatory exercise. People lost in the smallness of their lives and “passions”. Our galaxy the “Milkyway” will crash into the Andromeda galaxy around 3.75 billion years from now. That is part of the story. Small among the thousand billion galaxies that exist. Humanity will in all likelihood be gone long before then without even relics or ruins to show that we were once here on this planet.

I sit here looking out over the golf course writing this. In the distance, I see a storm gathering. The blue jays’ flit and flutter, eating from the ground. The ducks gather wagging their tails performing their dance rite of spring. And my flickering moment of existence, as I sit in the cold with a cigar and a black cup of quickly cooling coffee.

My story is important only to me and I am slowly discovering that isn’t either. Not more than a nanosecond of light, as it travels forever onward until dissipating into nothingness.

 

Thought Eighty Three

Sitting in my garage this morning smoking a cigar, drinking coffee, and feeling grumpy, I realized something.

I like it.

I like feeling rough and raw. Unshaven, the burn of a cigar and strong black coffee. The endless black that reaches out before us as we hurtle through space at forty percent of the speed of light.

Bugs on a rock.

This time aware of what I am. Knowing what matters and sometimes hating this whole human condition. The balance of all that pulls at us. Emotions like waves that constantly threaten to crash us against the rocks. The opportunity to learn to balance it all. The existence of emotionality tied so strongly through our bodies that seek constantly to control us. The ability to use our minds and perhaps across a thousand billion lives become something more than the traps that are the gods and daemons.

The gods and daemons are traps.

Traps of emotions. Traps of becoming an emotion that only owns itself in an endless spiral of nothingness. Two-sided coins that take us nowhere. That’s what a lot of the daemons and gods may be. Perhaps some are more.

Our bodies are machines. Machines that are dedicated to processing food, water and air. A fair amount of our brain is used to run the machine that is us. Beyond that comes emotions and thought. Emotions are from part from the mind, but largely from the body. Because the body remembers.

Bugs on a rock.

Then there is the mind. Right back where we started from. Struggling to overcome the emotional body and all that encompasses. Wisdom comes from reflection on a life of experience.

I often find truth in interesting places. Watching “Blacklist” on Netflix, the protagonist Ray Reddington said, “Wisdom is wasted on the old”.  The young don’t want to hear it. So you end up shouting to an empty room. But in my thoughts, the room isn’t empty. I am in it. So perhaps the wisdom is wasted at all. Perhaps my enjoyment of this wisdom, what I have learned over my life and self reflection makes it all worthwhile to me.

Bugs on this rock. Traveling at forty percent of the speed of light.

And the speed is increasing…

 

 

Thought Eighty Two

I am a pilot in my own mind and emotions.

I didn’t feel like I am the sense of ”I am” more and more of the time this last week, but just a pilot of this collection of emotions, PTSD, and many other things that seem to make up this mental compilation of me. It feels scary at times, a series of white water rapids that threatens to spill me off into the raging torrent. 

I remember decades ago when it was just me. The world out of control, people ”doing” things to me. It wasn’t good. I felt helpless. The direction of life going where it would. Now it feels much more like riding a wave. Piloting the consciousness that is me, riding this wave. Riding it until it breaks gently against the shore. Or crashes into the rocks. 

Either one is fine, on the other side of the black.

The river of dreams that is the black. All of the things we can’t remember life to life. The immense burden of the weight of our histories across a thousand million lives in parallels of the endless realities branching out. Too much for one mind or not? I don’t really know. Perhaps instead it is learning to pilot the mind of this entity that we are. Then maybe we can ingest all of this at once the way the gods do.

Coming back home, I feel reconnected back to my sweet loving wife, this my daily existence, work, etc. Still, it feels strange sitting here in my garage smoking a cigar and working on application issues with a group of people spread across the globe. In my mind, I build another model of application data flows as I have done so many times before. Like a temp table of a database, this too I shall dump once resolved. Eve6 plays “Small town trap” as I write this.

Changing gears:

Writing the characters in my novel is similar to piloting my consciousness, only maybe a bit harder. Inside my mind, it is a bit more like keeping yourself balanced while not being overwhelmed by the surge of emotions. The characters are all written by me.  They become like friends that you know and enjoy getting to know. Watching them change and grow, much like the people we love around us. But I do find it exhausting at times being in so many different heads. It kind of makes sense to me why so many novels have only a couple of main characters of protagonist and antagonist. But then life can be wearying. Why wouldn’t creating be also? Even in the Christian mythos god rested in the seventh day.